Timing Affects the Outcome of Your Social Media Campaigns

Have you measured the results of your social media postings based on time and day? It turns out that the timing of your social media content can significantly impact the outcome and success of your campaigns. All this is revealed in a study from researchers at Cornell University and Sapienza University of Rome. The report is titled, “How to Schedule a Cascade in an Arbitrary Graph”.

The researchers on this study actually identified and developed an algorithm after analysing data from social networks. The algorithm was designed to account for how an individual’s choices and attitudes are affected by three things:

  1. The timing of the campaign
  2. The prevalence of attitudes among their peers
  3. How the scheduling of campaigns affect their reach (or failure to spread across social media).

Jon Kleinberg from Cornell University explains how timing plays a role in the success of social media posts, “To our surprise, the success of the cascade can sometimes be greatly affected by this choice of timing – with the right timing strategy, the cascade can have a good likelihood of spreading very widely, while with the wrong strategy, it can have very little chance of going far. The mathematical and computational challenge for us was then to characterize the kinds of timing strategies that are most effective, and how these strategies depend on the structure of the network I which they are operating.”

For an example of how this can apply to your company or business, think about rolling out a product or new service at different times to different geographic areas or different markets. If applying this algorithm to your social media campaigns is not within the scope of your department, you can still easily perform your own testing to discover what times and what days are best for sharing your content and be sure to use the different types of content you share in the variables you test out. Take into consideration that posting more than once is probably going to be necessary. Each social channel now provides some type of analytics, some more in depth than others. Those analytics combined with your own analytics program such as Google Analytics, will help you put the pieces together so that you can be more precise and successful with your social media campaigns.


Comments are closed.